I like it well enough. I can
talk the language, dear child, when I'm in the country. But you are my
new life, and I'm--well, dazzled, let's call it. Yesterday I had to
fetch you home and see that you didn't get hurt. Now, I've got to make
you happier every day for the next fifty odd years. It's a tall order,
and there's lots to do. I ought to begin."

"You began when you found me crying in Randal's study, Dick."

"Oh, it's easy to make people less wretched," he objected. "That's why
yesterday was, on the whole, a success. But--are you happy?"

"Awfully! Oh, just awfully!" murmured Amaryllis.

"There it is!" sighed Dick, with the humour which she knew already for
the natural shell of some wise little kernel. "And I've got to give you,
as you give me, the keen edge of appetite for all the world and for all
the people that play about in it. The stuff's all there, but----"

"Why, Dick, it's the same thing, after all, as yesterday. You saved me
from beasts and from fear and from myself. You made me laugh, and you
made me love--even made me love Tod, and poor Pepe, and the bees, and
the round-faced girl in the cottage they bumbled round; and 'Opeful
'Arry; and you brought me home to a fairy godmother. If you could do all
that in a day, Dick, just think what a lot of laughing and loving you'll
be able to dig out of fifty years. And I won't let you off. Wake up,
Dick. There's no dreaming about it all."

So they woke up together.

At the lunch-table, Amaryllis looked round her, and felt the last of her
troubles was over.

Randal showed, she thought, a face more serene and contented than she
had ever before seen him wear.

During the earlier part of the meal the talk went to and fro over the
track of what George rashly called the _Amarylliad_.

Randal told him the word was falsely constructed, _Iliad, Odyssey_ and
_Aeneid_ being, he said, syncopated adjectival forms derived from their
respective substantive stems.

"Ours," said George, "has been a rag-time Dunciad."

And when the coffee and George's elbows were on the table, and four of
his irresistible cigars alight:

"And us," he said, "not to get one little puff out of it all!"

"Advertisement," said Randal, "is the false dawn of fame. You, Mr.
Bruffin, do not, I believe, need it, and will certainly not get it out
of the Dope Drama. Miss Caldegard and my brother, who are likely to get
a great deal, will hate it."

Amaryllis flushed a little at the coupling o